AAAAUUUUUGHH!!! These kinds of "expert" recommendations from tools like coroner David Crerar make me wat to scream.

How much liability must a company bear in the face of just plain moronic consumer behavior? Seriously? How much?!

"Harris’s family told the inquest she had all her teeth removed after they went rotten due to excessive soft drink consumption . . . "

Morons.

" . . . and at least one of her children was born with no enamel on his teeth."

Morons.

"Crerar said the family had not considered her Coke habit dangerous because the drink did not carry any health warnings."

Morons.

The warning signs were all there that something was amiss.

According to other news reports:

In the months leading up to her death her health had deteriorated, [mother of Harris' partner] Hodgkinson said. ''She had no energy and was feeling sick all the time ... She would get up and vomit in the morning.'' [Partner Hodgkinson] said her Coke habit had become an addiction: ''She would get moody and get headaches if she didn't have any Coke and also feel low in energy.'' Hodgkinson's mother Vivian said Harris got ''withdrawal symptoms'' if her Coke ran out, including getting ''the shakes'' and becoming angry.

"Crerar said the family had not considered her Coke habit dangerous because the drink did not carry any health warnings."

Well, let's see... a mother of EIGHT at 30 years of age who drank 10 litres of soda a day, had all her teeth removed because they were rotten, had the equivalent of the delirium tremens when she ran out of Coke... not to judge, but it doesn't sound like a family of geniuses.

LFRAgain: "Take every instance of "Coca-Cola" found in this article and replace it with the word "lemonade," and the doctors would have seen the same results."

Depends on the lemonade, and even then it wouldn't contain half the chemicals Coca-Cola and other sodas does, not to mention the effects of carbonation. If you make the lemonade from scratch as I often do (when I drink lemonade, that is) and use natural sugars (in small quantities) instead of processed, it can be quite healthy.

The pathologist attributes Harris' enlarged liver to fatty deposits caused by excessive sugar consumption and low potassium levels, both or which could just as easily have been caused by consuming 10 liters of lemonade per day.

Lemons have very low potassium levels, and I know of no recipes for homemade lemonade that don't call for the addition of processed sugar. If what the pathologist states is true, then Harris could have just as easily suffered an enlarged liver from the ridiculously excessive consumption of homemade lemonade.

Okay, let's take lemonade out of the equation and replace it with 10-liters-per-day of sweetened coffee. You would see the same results: Low potasium levels plus high sugar content.

Now let's up the ante with the insane amount of caffeine involved in 10 liters of coffee. A 12-oz. Coke has approximately 34 miligrams of caffeine. A similar sized coffee, depending on how it's brewed has, at the low end, more than 100 milligrams of caffeine. So we're talking some 33,800 milligrams of caffeine per day, more than 3 times the caffeine content in the same amount of Coke and more than 67 times what the Mayo Clinic recommends as an allowable daily intake of caffeine.

Yet we don't hear angry cries for safety warnings on cups of coffee, do we?

Why? Because no one, to the best of my knowledge, has ever died from the over consumption of coffee. At least not on a scale we see here with Harris' self-poisoning. And why not? Because people, as a general rule of thumb, aren't so abysmally stupid as to kill themselves by imbibing 10 liters --- or 28 cups --- of coffee per day, giving themselves the arrhythmia and subsequent heart failure the coroner is claiming contributed to Harris' death.

"Crerar said the family had not considered her Coke habit dangerous because the drink did not carry any health warnings."

So I'm going to eat 15 McDonald's hamburgers a day because I don't see any warning labels on them.

Did this lady never visit the doctor? No one around her saw the problem and all were ignorant about the health hazards of drinking so much cola every day? It's not their fault because no one walked up to them and told them not to do that?